Meeting Margaret Cavendish
In the spring and summer of 1667, London began to see some odd goings-on. Seven years after the restoration of King Charles II to the throne — after England’s republican experiment under Oliver Cromwell ended in 1660 — and one year after the Great Fire had laid waste to the city, things were rather tense: the second Anglo-Dutch war was under way and, by the end of June, there would even be the fear of a Dutch invasion making its way up the Thames. But oddly, it wasn’t wars, invasion threats or geopolitical goings-on that caused the great and the good of London society to exchange frantic missives. At the beginning of April, a young man-about town wrote a rollickingly bizarre letter to his father.
